Weight of Fish for Length. 
Some short time ago this subject was men¬ 
tioned in one or two letters in these columns. 
In the first place it is to be said that while 
length or height is, in the case of the individual 
of any species, no index whatever of its actual 
weight, it may on the other hand be a perfect 
index to what the weight ought to be. A man 
six feet high, for instance, may weigh twenty 
stone, or only ten stone [140 pounds], but the 
anthropological expert, who has been all his life 
weighing Apollo-like men, perfect in form and 
proportion, according to the highest accepted 
standard of manly grace, will tell us in a moment 
and to an ounce what a man of six feet ought 
to weigh, and this principle fully applies to most 
living creatures so far as we know, and certainly 
applies to all our well known fishes. 
We now proceed to make out our standard 
for fish, say salmon to begin with, and then show 
how it is to be applied, and to this end we have 
to call in the assistance of the artist and the 
mathematician, and with their aid should not be 
long seeing the thing through satisfactorily. And 
first the artist. Of a large number of the finest 
freshest run salmon of thirty-six inches in length, 
we invite the man with eye to select some half 
dozen or so from the lot which he would take 
as the types of salmon beauty and symmetry. 
These we should proceed carefully and sepa¬ 
rately to weigh and then take the average, and 
on doing so will find that the ideal perfect sal¬ 
mon of three feet in length weighs twenty 
pounds almost to the ounce. This we accord¬ 
ingly select as our standard salmon. We could 
have gone another way to work—weighed the 
first fish, selecting twenty-pounders for the pur¬ 
pose, or indeed any other weight, but the plan 
adopted is equally sound. 
Here we have finished with the artist, and the 
man of geometry comes in. He begins by laying 
down the rule that similar solid bodies are to 
one another in weight and volume as the cubes 
of their homologous dimensions, and that salmon 
fully conform to this rule so long as the flesh 
of one sound fresh salmon is just the same 
weight as the same quantity of the flesh of any 
other sound fresh salmon. Therefore, if we 
are agreed that a weight of twenty pounds is 
always the correct thing for a thirty-six-inch fish, 
he is prepared to tell us in an instant what is 
the correct thing for any other fish to weigh 
according to its length. The weights of salmon, 
he says, are proportional to the cubes of their 
lengths, just like other things of symmetrical 
mass and uniform substance, hence lie gives us 
the following, in which L. and W. stand for the 
length and weight of any salmon on which we 
should wish to try weighing experiments by cal¬ 
culation : W., 20 pounds; L.. 3 (36 inches), and 
while those of us who know a thing or two about 
figures can at once make out from this for our¬ 
selves all we want, the weaker brethren may 
take it from us with confidence that this being 
translated means that the weight of a true sal¬ 
mon is at once ascertained by multiplying the 
cube of its length (in inches) «by .000428 very 
nearly. That is all. and for all practical pur¬ 
poses this rule may be taken as applying to trout 
also, approximating so closely as they do to the 
lines of salmon. And we may further remark 
that were sheep or horses or oxen or any kind 
of fish besides those mentioned in question, 
weight for length or height (always select the 
greatest dimension as it makes for accuracy) by 
judicious weighing and measuring and averaging 
of selected specimens, a similar rule can be made 
out and will be found wonderfully accurate in 
practice. 
And now we return for a moment to the 
weaker brethren once more, whose manipulation 
of decimals may not be their strong point. First 
then throw away all the decimal matter and only 
keep the 428, etc. But even this is too much, and 
we shall make an even 43 of it, and leave it at 
that. Carrying then our 43 in mind we multiply 
it by the length of a salmon in inches, then we 
again multiply this result by the length and finally 
this last result once more by the length. Then 
we have the true weight of a fish according to 
his inches. Of course our answer thus arrived 
at works out quite a great long mass of figures 
which means some tons, but this does not matter 
in the slightest, for all we need mind is the first 
figure or two, and there is consequently no pos¬ 
sibility of mistake. 
Take, for instance, the case of a lanky, ema¬ 
ciated lcelt landed in early March on its way to 
the sea, and of course at once returned by the 
angler as soon as he had laid his gaff shaft 
along it or used a piece of twine so as to mark 
its length. The actual weight of the creature 
in its then condition is of no interest, except so 
far as it shows how low an invalid can be 
brought by suffering and privation. On reach¬ 
ing home the angler ascertains that the fish was, 
let 11s say, fifty-five inches in length, and at once 
he wishes to know what it must have weighed 
when in condition a few months previously, for 
he feels he is entitled to claim having landed a 
fish of such weight, and in a sense he is right. 
That weight rather than length is the standard 
of size is really a mere convention, and a fifty- 
five-inch salmon is a great fish, and the ter¬ 
minology used in describing him should convey 
as much. The poor invalid may have only 
weighed a mere twenty pounds or thirty pounds, 
but such a weight gives a totally erroneous im¬ 
pression of the fish, and is, therefore, essentially 
false. We proceed then by our rule and pres¬ 
ently arrive at 7,154,125 pounds. The early 
figures alone concerning us, we therefore see our 
salmon was either 7, 71, 715 pounds or even 
more, so that 71 pounds was clearly his weight 
plus about half a pound more. No one should 
make a mistake here; 7 pounds or 715 pounds 
are in the case obvious absurdities of course, and 
things always work out in this way, and so one 
gets the weight of one’s fish very approximately 
■with ease. Last of all, one can make out a table 
of weight of fish for length at one’s leisure and 
keep it by one for future reference. 
Shannon Shore. 
The Rod and Reel on Salt Water. 
VII.—The Bluefish. 
Of the many sorts of fish which annually visit 
the Atlantic Coast, none is more erratic in move¬ 
ment and habit than the bluefish. With habits in 
many ways peculiar to themselves and versatile 
always in emergency, they are ever an object of 
interest and delight to the student and angler. 
Perhaps the'most remarkable thing about them 
is their wonderful rapidity of growth, and were 
it not for the many well authenticated cases de¬ 
noting their growth during well defined periods, 
the stories told of them might easily be classed 
with many fish stories not credible. Circum¬ 
stances, however, sometimes places in the hands 
of the observant, data which establishes the facts 
beyond dispute. As an instance, the mouths of 
our local rivers and arms of the sea are very 
frequently suddenly closed by the action of the 
ocean currents which throw sandbars across the 
mouths, closing the streams completely. When 
this occurs at the season of the year when the 
young fish are in inland waters, their growth 
can be, and many times has been, measured. 
A few years since. Shark River, New Jersey, 
became thus closed in August, when small blue¬ 
fish were abundant in it, and was not opened 
until late in October. Within the short period of 
little more than two months these fish grew from 
fingerlings of three to four ounces in August to 
full i-pound to 1 %-pound fish in October. This 
would seem to be almost unbelievable, were it 
not for the fact that thousands of them were 
taken, and it was sheer impossibility for them to 
get in from outside waters. 
What has been noticed in such cases is amply 
confirmed by outside observers in the open sea. 
The bluefish which pass south in early autumn, 
known as snappers, or snapping mackerel, return 
to us the following spring as two to three-pound 
fish, and in the autumn, having finished their 
round of rapacity in Northern waters, again go 
South the full four to seven-pound fish. 
That the bluefish spawns in the open sea is 
beyond dispute. No authenticated case oppose'd 
to this conclusion is known, and it is fully con¬ 
firmed by the fact that the fingerlings crowd in 
close along shore seeking every inlet, which they 
enter in multitudes, as if to escape their foes, as 
well as the more readily to secure their favorite 
food, the spearing, which at this season of the 
year is abundant in all coastwise streams. The 
fact that these young fish appear simultaneously 
along the New England and Middle Atlantic 
Coast, furnishes additional proof that the cradle 
of the infant bluefish is in the open sea. 
Their range is not fully known. They are 
periodically abundant on the coast as far south 
as' Florida. I have met with them in abundance 
there and seen the slaughter last for a period, 
and then when food was sti'l abundant and all 
conditions, so far as could be observed, favor¬ 
able, not a fish could he found. At times they 
are quite plentful in the Gulf -of Mexico, but 
there they do not appear to range close in shore. 
